CARACAS, VENEZUELA.-The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), the core cultural program of the Fundación Cisneros, announces the creation of a new grant that will support attendance by qualified Latin American museum professionals at each annual conference of CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. Interested professionals will apply to CIMAM, a committee of the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM), and conference attendees will be selected by a CIMAM committee established for this purpose.

Criteria for applications include financial need and the potential benefit of attendance at the conference to the applicants development and/or research. The CPPC grant will cover registration, travel, and lodging expenses of up to 1,500 per successful applicant. Applications for support for this years conference are due August 30, 2009, and may be obtained at www.cimam.org/arxius/noticias/Application_2009_Travel_Grants_Latin_America.pdf.

The first annual CIMAM conference for which the CPPC grant will apply is to be held in Mexico City on November 910, 2009. Titled Fair Trade: The Institution of Art in the New Economy, it will take place at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (November 9) and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (November 10). The focus of the conference will be the effects on art institutions of the current economic landscape and the opportunity that this landscape opens to embrace new models of management and exchange. Discussions are intended to generate creative thinking about the global resources that all arts organizations need to share, and to launch new possibilities for collaboration, exhibition sharing, and development.

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is an educational program of the Fundación Cisneros. Based in New York City and Caracas, the CPPC was established by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in the 1970s in order to advance scholarship on Latin American art, promote excellence in visual-arts education, and encourage a high level of expertise among Latin American art professionals. The CPPC additionally works to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America. It achieves these goals through exhibitions, publications, scholarly research, grants, and multifaceted education programs.

The CIMAM grant expands the support that the CPPC already offers to Latin American artists and art professionals. This includes sponsorship of a fellowship for Latin American students in the two-year post-graduate curatorial studies course at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and of a doctoral fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, in New York City, as well as annual fellowships for Latin American artists at the Skowhegan residency program, in Maine, and at RIAA (Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina).